As for your upcoming performance, I would say that you should just choose an instrument that you feel comfortable with and that will allow you to make the sound you feel is appropriate. And, of course, have fun!

Just in case anyone was wondering, we went with your advise above and went with what were available to us that were comfortable for us. It resulted in a "broken consort" of instruments that are, at least individually, not impossible for the time/area style-wise at least, but would probably not have been used together!

A Kurt Scherzer slide trombone with F attachment on third, a Heinem slide trombone on second, and a valve trombone whose maker's name escapes me on first. I think we made it work somehow. We did have fun for sure.

Liszt composed the "Hosannah" in 1862 (publ. 1867) for Eduard Grosse, who was trombonist and double bass player in the Weimar Court Chapel. He was for many years also Liszt's confidant, copyist, and traveling companion. At the groundbreaking for Wagner's Bayreuth festival theater in 1872 Grosse played third trombone, and then contrabass trombone during the first festival season in 1876. Given the time and place, it seems most likely that his "normal" instrument would have been a larger-bore tenor-bass trombone in B-flat/F. Based on the few measurements I have at my disposal, I would guess that it had a bore of ca. 14 mm or 0.55 in. I have to pass on the model, although it may well have been a Penzel (Leipzig), but in any case an instrument modeled on the trombones developed by Sattler (Leipzig) just a few decades earlier.

Howard

I'm resurrecting another old topic, just to chime in with some doubts that are starting to arise in my head, that B flat/F trombones were really so common in the 1860's and 70's. We do know that Sattler first came up with the idea and built an instrument for Queisser to play in 1839. None have survived however and I'm actually wondering now if very many were built. There are a few more Penzel trombones extant (I own one...) but I also don't know anyone that has seen an original Penzel with a valve. Perhaps there is one somewhere... and I really want to see one. I have not actually seen any B flat/ F trombones built before 1880. I searched the MIMO catalogue. None of the instruments in the Grassi catalogue with valve date from the 19th century as far as I remember. Perhaps there are some old catalogues with Bb F trombones pictured, but the ones I've seen are certainly late 19th or early 20th century. What I would really love to see would be a Penzel catalogue, if such a thing ever existed. Or a B flat/F trombone from the 1850's or 1860's. In any case all of the really old large bore trombones that I have seen (Sattler, Penzel, G.Ullmann) are straight B flat instruments. So if anyone has a picture or real instrument with a valve from the mid 19th century I want to to see it! Desperately...

The idea had made its way from Leipzig to the US by way of H. W. Moennig, possibly as early as the 1850s, certainly no later than 1883. The use of the Berlin valve certainly indicates that even in the tradition of the region that spawned the Sattler instruments, a rotary valve was not codified as standard on this type of instrument.

See my previous post on the AMZ description of the new Sattler trombone: Sattler's F valve. Even if there are no extant instruments from the 1840s and 1850s, this does not mean they didn't exist and weren't documented.

See also my previous posts (When did the large-bore bone appear? and trombone in the orchestra) drawing on the thesis of Ottmar Schreiber. It is apparent from his research that the new Tenorbaßposaune was in widespread use throughout the German-speaking lands within just a few years of its inception. The only places in which the older bass trombones lingered on were the military, where the F or E flat bass trombone was in use certainly until WWI, and the church, where smaller bore trombones, presumably in complete sets, were still used. This may have also contributed to the availability of such instruments long after they should have become obsolete, as my own post-WWII F bass by the East German firm Sächsische Musikinstrumenten Fabriken VEB dates from after the foundation in 1947.

See my previous post on the AMZ description of the new Sattler trombone: Sattler's F valve. Even if there are no extant instruments from the 1840s and 1850s, this does not mean they didn't exist and weren't documented.

See also my previous posts (When did the large-bore bone appear? and trombone in the orchestra) drawing on the thesis of Ottmar Schreiber. It is apparent from his research that the new Tenorbaßposaune was in widespread use throughout the German-speaking lands within just a few years of its inception. The only places in which the older bass trombones lingered on were the military, where the F or E flat bass trombone was in use certainly until WWI, and the church, where smaller bore trombones, presumably in complete sets, were still used. This may have also contributed to the availability of such instruments long after they should have become obsolete, as my own post-WWII F bass by the East German firm Sächsische Musikinstrumenten Fabriken VEB dates from after the foundation in 1947.

Thanks for that tip about Schreiber. I'll try to find a copy of that somewhere.Part of my challenge at the moment is to come up with a blueprint for how a Sattler/Penzel trombone with F valve would have been set up. My 1870's Penzel tenor can form a perfectly good model for an mid 19th C tenor-bass trombone insofar as for bell form, shape of the bell and slide bows, and slide dimensions are concerned. We even know that Sattler had invented his own valve design (in 1821, a design which later became the Vienna pump valve) but I doubt if this design could be applied to a trombone.... There are also no extant brass instruments with Sattler's valve as far as I know.